


and hear you call my name

by mickleborger



Category: Ocean's (Movies), Ocean's 8
Genre: F/F, POV First Person, terrible haunted places are people too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 12:29:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15243420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: you know i have no idea when i last wrote something that wasn't about eldritch landscapes and/or identity issuesanyway, debbie is the ocean





	and hear you call my name

**Author's Note:**

> (iamamiwhoami, "Hunting For Pearls")

I was handed a book by Lovecraft, once, by an excitable young man who loved it and had no opinion about whether or not I would. I smiled, and did not see him again. I don’t know what happened to the book. Its author, who talked a lot about dying at sea, did not die at sea. I think the sea would have spat him back out.

The sea is without memory, they say. The waters come and wash away memories, and corpses, and little lines drawn in the sand by littler fingers. The ocean is for forgetting, they say, but I think of all the things that have come home here only to wail and I am not sure. There is plenty memory in the sea. It is only the land that forgets what has been taken.

Lou is riding up the ridge above the ocean, going north, following the coast, with many things we took together. The part of me that demanded limbs wants her back where I am, wants her lips on mine, her hands on me -- but I am not only that little piece of a thing, and I wait, and I smile when the moon rises and she strides straight into the tide, into the part of me that wants her most. I like the smirk she has when she tastes me, her eyes glancing upwards as if to meet mine, as if her mouth were not against the waves but rather between the legs I made for myself, in a hotel where our names were never spoken aloud, that same angle in her jaw.

I am here, in a place that pretends to be underground but could not conceive of the things that dwell in the deep. I think it knows that, for what a miniscule god it is. I respect that. It shows me the name of something that I call _brother_ now that it has been so far gone from me but that I remember as clearly as if it were me -- as if it had been me, as if we could have been the same, and had been for a time longer than any proud boy in a bookstore of any quality could dream of. I am not dead, not even this part of me, but neither am I here. I am elsewhere. Or. Well. The part of me that could have been me but fell away into Danny is elsewhere. Do we come back to ourselves, I wonder, lost in the script of his (name, I guess he calls it a name), after we have made a name _ours_? 

I do not know if my brother-me lives. I only know he is not here.

Lou’s fingers dig into the wet sand and I am there, rushing up and then back out again, my hand still on my glass in this dry waxy tomb but the rest all around her under a moon that casts shadows long enough for ghosts. It took me a while to learn that sometimes, far from the sea, there is no light of any sort, and no shadows are cast.

In the morning Lou sets off again and I watch her go, tiny glowing thing I wouldn’t have looked twice at if I did not know who it was, and I am still here in my crypt staring at a name that might have been mine.


End file.
